Chapter Seven #2
“The files arrived at 0500. You weren't sleeping before that.”
He probably heard my restless turning through the walls, tracked my breathing patterns, counted the rhythm of my pulse. “I had other things to think about.”
“What things?”
The question hangs between us, and I can't confess that I spent half the night wondering what would have happened if he hadn't pulled back.
“The shape of the threat.” My lie comes out smooth enough.
He watches me for a long moment before nodding, a small motion that suggests he heard what I didn't say. “Finish your analysis. I'll arrange the equipment.”
He turns toward the door, and the words escape before I can stop them: “You're leaving me here?”
He pauses at the threshold, looking back at me with that unreadable expression. “Briefly. You need equipment I need to acquire. I'll return within the hour.” A pause. “Don't leave this room without me.”
“Is that an order?”
“It's a request. Whoever is killing my enforcers may be aware of your involvement, and until we identify them, you stay where I can protect you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I know.” His gaze holds mine for a heartbeat longer. “Stay anyway.”
Then he's gone, footsteps silent on the stone floor, presence withdrawing like a tide that takes all the temperature with it. I turn back to my analysis and tell myself the shiver running down my spine is from the cold.
He returns in forty-three minutes to take me back to the medical bay where cases are stacked in a corner: molecular analysis arrays, compound isolation chambers, a toxin identification system that makes me want to weep with professional envy.
“This is tier one and tier two.” I run my fingers over the cases, unable to keep the wonder from my voice. “You acquired this in less than an hour.”
“The Crimson Bazaar opens early for those who pay premium rates.”
“This is more than premium. This is...” I trail off, unable to find words that capture the magnitude of what he's done. Equipment like this doesn't get purchased on a whim; it requires contacts and leverage and resources that most people don't own.
He has them. He used them. For the investigation, I tell myself. For his enforcers. Not for me.
“Can you work with it?”
“Yes.” I unpack the first case. “This changes everything. With this equipment, I can identify the compound within days instead of weeks, maybe hours if the molecular signature is distinct enough.”
He doesn't leave. I expected him to, now that the equipment has arrived and the access is granted and the pieces are in place.
There's no practical reason for him to stand in my medical bay and watch me calibrate analysis arrays, but he watches anyway, and the morning unfolds in a rhythm I don't expect.
I work; he shadows. I ask questions about compound security and personnel access and supply chain vulnerabilities; he answers with a candor that surprises me. The formality of our earlier interactions begins to crack, revealing partnership. Possibly. If monsters have partners.
“You're staring at that screen like it personally offended you.”
His words pull me out of the data spiral I've been drowning in for the past hour, and when I blink and refocus on the present, I find him closer than he was before. When did he move? I didn't hear him move. Seven feet of muscle and menace crossed rooms like smoke. Dangerous.
“It's not giving me what I need.” I gesture at the preliminary analysis. “The compound is sophisticated. Engineered. Not something someone could synthesize in a home lab.”
“Which means?”
“Which means the killer has access to advanced pharmaceutical equipment and manufacturing facilities.
Resources that most people on Vahiri don't have.” I turn to face him, and he's close, too close, close enough that temperature radiates off him in waves.
“How many facilities on Vahiri have the capability to engineer a compound like this?”
“Three. House Zhael's intelligence labs, the Syndicate's central medical facility, and House Draven's own pharmaceutical division.” A muscle tightens in his jaw. “The pharmaceutical division reports to my father. I don't have direct oversight.”
“Would your father...”
“No.” The denial comes immediate and absolute. “This isn't sanctioned. If my father wanted someone eliminated, he wouldn't use poison. He wouldn't need to.”
The certainty in his words speaks to violence I can only imagine. House Draven's reputation wasn't built on subtlety; if they want someone dead, they want the death noticed.
“Then someone inside House Draven is using your father's resources to kill your enforcers.” I turn back to the analysis because looking at his face while I say the rest feels dangerous. “Someone close. Someone trusted.”
The silence stretches before he answers.
“A traitor.”
The word hangs between us. A traitor inside House Draven. Someone close enough to know patrol schedules and target high-value enforcers. Someone patient enough to make four separate murders look like accidents.
“I'll need personnel records if you want me to look into who might be responsible. Everyone with access to the pharmaceutical division who would know enforcer schedules and medical procedures.”
“That's a broad list.”
“Narrow it for me.” I meet his gaze and hold it despite the intensity pressing against my skin. “Who has the capability and the access? Who benefits from weakening House Draven's enforcement arm?”
He's quiet for a long moment, processing possibilities I cannot see, the silver of his eyes catching the medical bay's lighting and reflecting it back in fractured patterns.
“I'll get you the records.”
“Tonight?”
“Now.” He pauses at the threshold and turns. “Have you eaten?”
The question catches me off guard. “What?”
“Food. Sustenance. The thing humans require to maintain function.” There it is again, that ghost of expression transforming his features, the corner of his mouth curving in an almost-smile that sends a cascade of sensation through me. “You've been working for five hours. You forgot.”
I did forget. “I'll eat later.”
“You'll eat now.” He disappears through the door before I can protest, and I'm left standing in the medical bay wondering when captors started treating property this way.
He returns ten minutes later with a tray holding more food than I consume in a day: some kind of protein, a grain I don't recognize, a beverage steaming in the recycled air.
“Eat.” He sets the tray on the console beside my workspace. “The records will take time to compile. You may as well be functional when they arrive.”
“Is that concern I hear?”
The words emerge before I can stop them, tinged with the sharp humor I deploy when situations get too complicated to face. His gaze finds mine, and something shifts in those silver depths as his pupils expand and his nostrils flare, scenting what I cannot hide.
“Would it bother you if it were?”
I don't have an answer. The question lodges beneath my sternum alongside all the other things I refuse to examine: the wanting, the wondering, the way I'm leaning toward him without permission.
“Eat.” The word comes out rough, lower than his usual register. “We have work to do.”
The food is rich and filling, prepared with a care that seems at odds with Vahiri Prime. He turns to the console and pulls up the records I requested, and I tell myself to focus on the meal instead of the male three feet away. I fail.
The amber light traces the silver threading beneath his skin, luminous lines that pulse when his heart rate changes.
His hands move across the controls with his claws retracted, and my gaze keeps snagging on the flex of tendons in his forearms, the breadth of wrists thick enough to crush a human throat one-handed.
Those claws have killed. Those hands have ended lives in ways I don't want to imagine. I should be afraid of them.
I'm not.
When he shifts position, I glimpse fangs behind parted lips, white and sharp and built for tearing flesh from bone.
His eyes reflect the console's glow, silver discs that hold no pupils when the light hits them wrong, and for a moment he looks like the monster the galaxy believes him to be.
Seven feet of contained violence. The thing other predators run from.
He's pretending to work. I'm pretending not to notice that his attention keeps drifting back to me, that hunter's focus fixed on my mouth each time I raise the fork. When I glance up, he's studying the screen. When I look away, his gaze settles against my skin again.
The thing is, I've seen monsters. I've patched soldiers torn apart by creatures with less conscience than a plasma round.
I've held dying men while the things that killed them circled back for more.
I learned to recognize evil by the absence behind its eyes, the hollow space where mercy should live.
Drazex has no hollow space. When he looks at me, there's too much behind those silver discs, not too little.
Hunger, yes. Restraint. A patience that costs him more than he wants me to see.
He's dangerous in a thousand ways I can name and a thousand more I can't, but dangerous isn't the same as monstrous.
And that's the problem, isn't it? I'd find this easier if he were what he appears to be.
He leaves to verify a supply chain detail. Twenty minutes, he says. Thirty at most.
An hour passes.
I keep working, cross-referencing access logs against the timeline we've built, but his absence registers in ways I can't justify. The medical bay holds his warmth differently when he's not in it. The silence has a texture I notice only because he's not filling it.
When the door opens, I don't look up. I give myself three seconds to smooth my expression into professional focus before I turn.